Watch this YouTube Short on the topic of learned helplessness.
I learned the term back in undergrad during a course in abnormal psychology, but the scenario I encountered in my psych textbook was a lot grimmer. I recounted that scenario in my homeschooling book Think Like a Teacher. People who care enough to read the entries in that book's glossary will find this:
learned helplessness (n.) Technically, learned helplessness is a condition in which an organism constantly subjected to extremely negative stimuli (say, electric shocks) reaches a point where it simply gives up and stops trying to avoid or escape the stimuli. Before the ethical treatment of animals was a prominent thing, there was one experiment done on some rats that were placed in vats of water. Each vat also had a strong stream of water pointing down at the rat, meaning the rat had to swim to stay above the water’s surface (I assume water was draining out the bottoms of the vats to maintain water level). Naturally, rats in such a situation would tread water for hours. However, scientists discovered that, if one were first to hold a rat in a reinforced glove until it stopped struggling in the hands, and then placed it in the water vat, the rat would give up swimming after only a few minutes, dive to the bottom of the vat, and drown. This example of learned helplessness—aside from being cruel—is rather extreme, so apply it to the homeschooling situation only as a cautious analogy. I may have made a mistake in bringing up the topic at all, but I think it is possible for there to be situations, in a toxic classroom, where students reach a point where nothing can motivate them. Such a situation, while not quite analogous to the rat experiment, is extreme in its own way. (If you have a strong stomach, look up the paper that describes the rat experiment: Richter, Curt P. “On the Phenomenon of Sudden Death in Animals and Man.” Psychosomatic Medicine, Volume XIX, No. 3, 1957, pp. 191-198. You can find a PDF of this article online at this URL: https://www.aipro.info/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/phenomena_sudden_death.pdf. It’s a pretty morbid read.)
(The last part of the text is formatted slightly differently in the book.)
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